HMS Indefatigable (R10): Back Flying Aircraft 37 Minutes After a Kamikaze Strike

The Third of Her Class

HMS Indefatigable was an Implacable-class fleet aircraft carrier, sister ship to HMS Implacable, sharing the same fundamental design philosophy of a heavily armoured flight deck and hangar that had already proven its worth aboard earlier ships of the wider Illustrious lineage. She entered service in the closing years of the Second World War and, like her sister, was rushed into the demanding operational tempo of the British Pacific Fleet's campaign against Japan.

A Kamikaze on Easter Sunday

HMS Indefatigable's defining moment came at 07:28 on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1945, while operating off Sakishima Gunto near Okinawa. A Japanese Zeke fighter-bomber, carrying a 550-pound bomb, pressed home an attack despite being intercepted by Royal Navy Seafires flown by Sub Lieutenant R.H. Reynolds and John Birtle; Birtle's gun camera later confirmed his cannon fire had struck the enemy aircraft, which appeared to break apart mid-dive, yet the pilot still managed to reach the ship. Aiming to dive straight down her funnel, he instead struck the flight deck at the point where it joined the island superstructure, hitting the forward crash barrier.

The impact depressed the armoured flight deck by around three inches over a fifteen-foot area, destroyed the radio office, flight-deck sick bay and pilot's briefing room, damaged two Avengers and a Firefly parked nearby, and started fires that spread across the steel deck and into the island itself. The human cost was heavy: 14 men were killed, eight instantly and six more later of their wounds, including the ship's Lieutenant Commander (Flying), her Air Engineering Officer and the Flight Deck Medical Officer, with a further 32 wounded. Witness accounts of the scene were genuinely harrowing, one able seaman found his gun sight clogged with human remains, and searchers could find only a single fragment of the kamikaze pilot himself.

Flying Again in 37 Minutes

HMS Indefatigable's armoured design proved its worth in spectacular fashion: ruptured high-pressure steam pipes in the island helped smother the flames within four minutes, and remarkably, the ship resumed flight operations just 37 minutes after being struck, landing her first Seafire at 08:16 with only a single crash barrier still working. It was a genuinely staggering recovery time that stood in stark contrast to the fate of American carriers hit by similar attacks, prompting one anonymous United States Navy liaison officer to offer what became one of the most quoted lines of the entire Pacific War: 'When a kamikaze hits a US carrier, it's six months repair at Pearl. In a Limey carrier it's a case of sweepers, man your brooms.'

HMS Indefatigable's damaged armoured plates and structural steelwork were fully replaced within six days at Leyte by the Fleet Train's repair engineers, restoring her flight deck to full operational condition, a genuinely remarkable feat of forward repair work that kept her in the fighting line for the remainder of the campaign against Japan.